‘Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun:
Time Immemorial (You’re Just Mad Because We Got Here First)’

“I’m having a bad
colonial day” (Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun)

In response to the recent
celebration of Canada’s 150 years of confederation, guest curator Victor Wang
and influential contemporary
artist Lawrence
Paul Yuxweluptun (b 1957), who is of Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish and Okanagan (Syilx) First Nations descent,
present the exhibition ‘Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun:
Time Immemorial (You’re Just Mad Because We Got Here First)’.

This is the artist’s first
institutional solo exhibition in Europe, and the first solo exhibition by a
Canadian First Nations artist in the Canadian High Commission’s gallery in
London.

For more
than 40 years Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b. 1957) has recorded issues of land rights, national identity,
environmental destruction and what he sees as the real forms of colonialism facing First Nations
People in Canada. Yuxweluptun was born into a family of activists, and as a
pioneering contemporary artist he offers an important perspective on painting:
as a space to record history from an Indigenous perspective, and as a space for
resistance and opposition.

The
exhibition, on one level,draws
attention to the entangled connections between unceded First Nations
territories in Canada (those lands that were never signed away through a treaty
process or conquered by war) and the displacement of Indigenous people, both in
representations of landscape art and in Canadian (art) history. On another, how
Yuxweluptun’s practice opens up questions about the institutions that are
designated to record history, and how communities existing outside of those institutions
struggle to document and shares stories of trauma to future generations.

The
title of the exhibition, ‘Time
Immemorial (You’re Just Mad Because We Got Here First)’, a whimsical remark about the idea of Canadian confederation, and
the exhibition itself, points to a concept of a time and history before
European contact – to communities and civilisations that existed long before
Europeans began to exercise dominion over First Nations territories. A time
immemorial: that is, a time that exists outside of the European definition of a
colony, a country, a confederation and the very concept of modern Canada.

The
exhibition includes works from the 1980s to the 2000s, including the artist’s pen
on paper works such as White Man Speaks
with Forked Tongue, Land Claims Consultant #1 (2013), a work that speaks to
the ongoing struggles with governments by Indigenous peoples to have their land
titles recognized, and the difficult task of having pre-European rights and
interests properly represented in modern common law. Where traditional land ceremonies
and Indigenous forms of recording history are not recognized under the Canadian
court system. The work is part of an ongoing portrait series, Super Predator, that often depicts
animated humanoid-like creatures wearing business suits.

Also
featured is the work Guardian Spirits on the
Land: Ceremony of Sovereignty (2000), a painting that adopts traditional
Northwest Coast and Coast Salish cultural myths and traditions to depict a
ceremony of sovereignty, conducted by the guardian spirits of the land. The work addresses the need for
sovereignty on unceded First Nations territories, and the important connections
these traditional lands have with the history of a people and the ceremonies
that have been practised for thousands of years.

Yuxweluptun reimagines the ‘white’ and ‘traditional’
twentieth-century Canadian landscape – notably void of any depiction of First
Nations – to remind his audience that these landscapes were not, in fact,
‘untouched’ before the arrival of European settlers. The artist is not only
speaking to the physical absence of First Nations people in the scenes
portrayed, he is reminding us of their absence from our institutions and wider
contemporary society. Yuxweluptun’s use of vibrant colours and current themes imagined
through the protagonist in his paintings abstract his work beyond a simple
application of traditional Northwest Coast forms and histories, and into a new
complex interwoven space of ancestry and the recording of an Indigenous contemporaneity.

Guardian Spirits on the Land: Ceremony of Sovereignty (2000), courtesy of the artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art

Nature
(its destruction through industrialization); the environment, as both subject
and ancestral being, and the complex issue of land rights and control over
natural resources in Canada are both a personal and a collective subject matter
which play a central theme in Yuxweluptun’s art. Super Clear Cut (1993), for example, depicts the aggressive clearcutting
of forest in British Columbia, and the destructive effects this industrial
practice has on the local ecosystem and natural habitats. Yuxweluptun also points
to the significance of the landscape to First Nations history and memory.
Nature, for Yuxweluptun, is a living entity that should be protected, and his
landscapes regularly mirror the appearance of his protagonist, making visible
the interconnections between nature and community. Often depicted through a mix
of human traits and qualities, the landscape is repeatedly stylized with traditional
Northwest Coast masks, characteristics and forms. The protagonist in Super Clear Cut, also wearing a stylized
traditional mask (like the leaves on the tree), is shown watching over the only
tree that was left uncut.

Yuxweluptun’s
work occupies a complex space that interweaves pre-and post-colonial ways of life,
questioning legacies of landscape art, Canadian history and Surrealism by recontextualizing
traditional Northwest Coast forms and myths to bring to light what Yuxweluptun sees as the source of its origins, and subjects that have always been
part of Indigenous culture. The artist’s work serves as both an artistic expression and also as a journal. Through these pieces, he documents the experiences of Indigenous communities and communicates with them. They also serve as an at-times blunt refusal to accept the dominant narratives of how First Nations peoples are portrayed by the ruling powers and their institutions.
Presented
in the context of Canada House, the exhibition questions how the history of
colonization in the United Kingdom is understood when confronted by indigenous
contemporary practices (from the former British colonies), and the importance
of remembering that First Nations peoples are not merely absent in art; their
stories and histories – their very existence – have been buried not just in art
history, but also in world history.